Guest Blogging Guidelines

Thanks for your interest in writing a guest blog for Cube Creative Design.

If you have exceptional writing and/or design skills and would like to share your expertise with our audience of small businesses, private schools, and churches, we'd love to hear from you.

Please take some time to review this entire page — it should answer any questions you have about what kind of content we're looking for and how the submission process works. We will reject any submissions that do not meet the requirements outlined below.

While we value your time, we must also ask that you respect ours. Unfortunately, we are not able to respond to all inquiries.

The Bare Essentials for Every Post We Publish

Successful guest contributions are detailed, data-driven, and fascinating pieces that educate our readers about something new about the business world. While we tend to focus on online marketing, we are open to other topics of benefit to small business owners. These may include topics such as:

  • Recruiting
  • Writing
  • Internet trends
  • Social media
  • Google Business Profile
  • Bing Places
  • Reputation Management
  • Sales and Marketing techniques or tips
  • Performance marketing
  • Video
  • Online marketing industry trends
  • Conversion optimization
  • Content marketing

Additionally, here are a few things we will also look for:

  • Original concepts and high-quality writing. We will not republish anything that's been published elsewhere. Yes, we do check every post!
  • The post can be casual and fun, yet authoritative and, above all, helpful. If you quote a statistic, back it up with a link to the original source, not just the page you found it. See how we prefer to have them quoted below. 
  • No more than one link to your company's website. (Note: This includes your website homepage, blog, pricing page, etc.) in the body of the post.
  • Links to content that we have currently on our site (search of our site) will get priority approval and faster posting. You will also have a better chance of your articles staying posted past one year of publish date.
  • No more than 2-5 links per 1,000 words.
  • Posts should be at least 1,200 words excluding title and meta description
  • If you use photos or images please provide those as attachments or provide a link to download them.

What We Won't Accept

There are some things we simply can't accept:

  • Anything that's been covered on our blog before. Please do a search of our site before submitting your articles.
  • Anything that may be construed as a link-building scheme.
  • Anything that is too promotional for your company or organization.
  • Anything that is offensive or inaccurate.
  • Anything that is overly critical of individuals or companies — this is not a site to air grievances.
  • Anything of adult content, bitcoin, gambling, political, etc.
  • Anything that focuses on e-commerce.
  • Anything that focuess on WordPress.

The Not-So-Fine Print

  • Submissions must meet Cube Creative Design's quality standards to get published. We reserve the right to reject contributions at our discretion and for any reason.
  • We cannot allow you to republish your guest post to your own blog, LinkedIn, Medium, etc., afterward.
  • Cube Creative Design reserves the right to edit and adapt your guest blog content as we see fit and update it in the future for accuracy and comprehensiveness.
  • Cube Creative Design reserves the right to include calls-to-action to Cube Creative Design content, including but not limited to email newsletters, ebooks, and other downloadable content.
  • In some cases, contributed posts may be removed (after one year) from the blog and the URL recycled.
  • Cube Creative Design reserves the right to use guest blog author’s likeness across our content as we see fit, including but not limited to Cube Creative Design’s social media channels.
  • We request a minimum engagement of at least three (3) blogs. This helps both you the content creator and us out. We are looking for content partnerships.
  • If you include images in your post, you must submit them separately, and they must be at least 1920 px x1080px.

Timeline For Posting

  • We only post guest posts on Fridays.
  • Typically, we only allow 1-2 guest posts per Friday (at the editor's discretion), and they are on a first-come-first-serve basis.
  • We take off for most major US holidays (see below), so your submission will be responded to when we return.
    • New Year's Day
    • Good Friday
    • Memorial Day
    • A week around Independence Day
    • Labor Day
    • The week of Thanksgiving
    • A week around Christmas and the following week
    • Vacations throughout the year

How to Submit A Cube Creative Design Guest Blogging Post

Step 1: Conduct a Google site search. 

  • If there is only one step you complete to turn in a pitch, this should be the one. Note: This is not a standard website search.
  • Didn't click on the link we just provided? You wouldn't be the first. Simply copy and paste this URL in your search bar: “site:cubecreative.design/blog” and add a space followed by the keyword you're targeting with your pitch.
  • For example: “site:cubecreative.design/blog content marketing”. In this example, you'll see we have published content around content marketing.

Step 2: Format your post appropriately.

Don't sacrifice depth in the name of brevity. We don't have a fixed word limitation for the blog, but most posts should be between 800 and 2,000 words. Instead of attempting to meet a set word limit, concentrate on providing clear, in-depth explanations that readers of all levels can comprehend and benefit from. Over-explaining a concept is preferable to under-explaining it and leaving some readers in the dark.

  • Please no links before the frist h2 tag or introduction, this provides us a place to break the text for the read more link. Also no links in the conclusion.
  • Paragraphs should be no more than three to five sentences long and formatted using H2s, H3s, and H4s, when appropriate. We have provided a nice template here. If you fail to include this, it will result in an automatic rejection.
  • Add bulleted lists to help break up dense copy chunks. Numbered lists should be formatted as number + period.
  • Always include a conclusion.
  • Always include a meta description. If you fail to include this, it will result in an automatic rejection.
  • When including images, gifs, or screenshots, cite the image source as: “Image source” and hyperlink that text with the page you found the image on.
  • If you include images please embed the images in the Google Doc and send them as a separate attachment, this aids us in posting your content faster.
  • Copy and paste your post into Grammarly or Google Docs and run a spell-check. These editing tools are our favorites for identifying hidden misspellings and excessive spaces. We also like Hemingway Editor to check for complicated sentence structure and run-on sentences; if you have Grammarly premium, that is a plus.
  • Include a brief bio 
  • We prefer AP Style for 99% of the post
  • We do prefer an Oxford comma (which is against AP Style)
  • Citing external sources
    • If external, please also list the source either as they said or at the end

Step 3: Submit your idea using the form below

Use the form below and link to your Google Document. We will only accept submissions via a Google Document formatted properly using the template provided.

If your post is chosen, be prepared to submit the following:

  • Your completed post or pitch in a Google Document with editing permissions turned on for “anyone with the link.” Failure to submit this way will result in an automatic rejection.
  • If you include images, add them into the Google Document, and provide proper attribution below each image (e.g., image source). Also, be prepared to submit them via email.

If your article meets editorial standards and aligns with our content strategy, we will respond to let you know your article will be published. That process may take up to 4 weeks, and the publish date could exceed this timeline based on the needs of our editorial calendar.

Due to the volume of requests we receive, we cannot respond to all submissions.

 

Updated: May 2, 2024